On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 03:12:59AM +0100, Tomasz Rola wrote: > On Tue, 12 Nov 2013, Hendrik Boom wrote: > > > On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 10:56:09AM -0600, Lawrence Bottorff wrote: > > > I'm your typical newbie who is hand-wringing over what direction to go in > > > the general functional programming world. Lisp, Scheme, or Haskell? > > > > [...] > > > > > > I understand that Barski is slavishly following the "let's get real stuff > > > done" philosophy, but I'm not up to speed with functional yet to even know > > > what's going on. Is your "Realm of Racket" better at this? I feel like I'm > > > spinning my wheels at this point. . . . > > > > > > LB > > > > I should mention that another, quite different approach to functional > > programming is the language OCAML. See http://ocaml.org/ for details. > > > > I program using Scheme and OCAML as high-level languages.
Well, actually, I also use Modula 3, that's a copletely different kind of language. And I have some code in C/C++ as well. My code in those languages is hardly functional at all. > I may be very much wrong, so I cowardly apologise in advance, but I > happened to subscribe to certain Haskell related NGs just in time to > witness, kind of, interesting exchange there. In short, some > incompatibilities were introduced into ghc (AFAIR) and this rendered some > (a lot?) of working code uncompilable. OCaml is not Haskell. Not remotely. Ocaml is *not* a vehicle for research into lazy evaluation of purely functinoal code. > I did not follow it to the very > end, because at one point I simply lost interest. The tone I remember was > "what, they can't update their code to agree with new compiler - too bad, > let's drop the ballast and move on". My conclusion was, Haskell was still > in the making. So if I decided to use it, I should be prepared to rewrite > my code from time to time. And this is exactly the thing I hate - I hate > rewriting the code, be it from one language to another "cooler" language > or from dialect to dialect or from one program fragment to another. I > really appreciate attitude of gcc compiler, which, at least in theory, > allows me to compile very old code without a problem [1]. Except gcc does try to keep up with the C standard, which does get revised now and then. > > I'm not sure if Ocaml is more like gcc or more like ghc, but I decided to > learn it rather than H*. It's an applicative language with some imperative features. I'm not a masochist; I use the imperative features when appropriate. If you want to look at something I wrote last year, I entered the liberated pixel cup challenge (http://lpc.opengameart.org/) last year with an attempt at a video game. I spent the month I had (re)learning OpenGL, learning Ocaml, and putting together something that actually ran, and can keep me amused for maybe five or ten minutes. I didn't win the liberated pixel cup, nor did I expect to. My code is available at http://topoi.pooq.com/hendrik/dv/free/fun/wander/index.html Have fun. You'll need some obscure development libraries to run it. > > As of Racket vs CL, I think they are very comparable, with CL's one leg > stuck in prehistory (the filesystem concept scared the bejesus out of me, > almost) and Racket being modern and a bit alien to me, who licked (shyly) > Dybvig's book in times of R4RS... But, the docs are great, so I can > actually fire up drracket, google for some pointers in the docs and write > code in, say, quarter hour or a few. Batteries included, thanks a lot for > them :-). So for a beginner, Racket is a very good choice. Ability to use > some Scheme introductory material, complete with real R5RS mode (it is > fully compatible, isn't it :-) ), is great bonus, because it allows for > more choices - I am trying to tutor my sister (already graduated, so > English and logic is not a problem), and the choice of first intro book to > programming is crucial. SICP have just been toppled down, now I am on the > look again :-). > > (OTOH, I'm not sure if I'd want to write compiler in Racket. Maybe. For a > while, I want to use both CL and R* and see what happens.) Scheme is a lot better than many languages for writing a compiler, actually. I'd certainly prefer it to C or C++. Recently I've noticed compilers being written in OCaml, which seems well-suited to it. > > By the way, I don't do exclusively pure functional programming. Most > > of my code is functional, but I use imperative mechanisms when > > apppropriate. I consider that building real systems as pure > > functional code is extremism bordering on masochism. > > Yes. One more reason to rethink using Haskell, I guess... Pure functional > looks cool in theory and blogs but in every day get-stuff-done it might be > not so cool and pure anymore, at least in my case. Besides, I understand > that the need for monads makes it dirty functional. So I play it safe. Of > course I don't mean Haskell is bad or wrong choice. It just is not the > best choice for every problem, but I guess I will learn it, some time > later. > > [1] I wanted to quickly prove it with some code I downloaded in 1995, but > gcc complained about "redefined identifiers" and stuff, so in practice > some rewriting is required here, too (yes, I gave it "-ansi" but maybe > there is some more options to experiment with, maybe I will). A lot of people use gcc with -Wall which is quite helpful for catching bugs. > Regards, > Tomasz Rola -- hendrik ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
